Public Speaking Tip No. 2

March 14, 2014

I love pub­lic speak­ing. I don’t suf­fer any of the jit­ters or fears that many peo­ple think about when it comes to get­ting up on a stage and telling peo­ple what you think. I thought I’d share anoth­er pub­lic speak­ing tip, one I feel real­ly strong­ly about. Appar­ent­ly, so does Apple’s Eddy Cue.

I’ve always won­dered though… there are so many peo­ple who can’t help but pro­mote their com­pa­nies when they speak (even when asked not to). I remem­ber one pre­sen­ta­tion, in either Europe or South Africa, where I lit­er­al­ly got hugged after­wards (by a guy!) who loved that I didn’t men­tion my com­pa­ny name once after intro­duc­ing myself. I hadn’t even men­tioned my prod­uct. I was talk­ing about APM and the need for a dif­fer­ent type of man­age­ment in a dis­trib­uted appli­ca­tion where dif­fer­ent pieces were under dif­fer­ent con­trol. That was in com­par­i­son (I had noticed) to my main com­peti­tor at the time who sim­ply used his reg­u­lar cor­po­rate pitch but with­out his logo (you could lit­er­al­ly see blanked out spots in the graph­ics where his logo would have been).

Speak­ing at a con­fer­ence is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share ideas. It should be obvi­ous that I work for a com­pa­ny, and that I want you to use my prod­uct. My pas­sion indi­cates my belief. If you want to know more about my com­pa­ny, I always hang out at con­fer­ences so peo­ple can met me. Of course, I’m pret­ty respon­sive on social media as well (some­thing that’s not always of obvi­ous val­ue to cor­po­rate types).

That said, I have a very broad expo­sure to things going on in the indus­try as a result of my job. That makes what I have to say inter­est­ing. While you may not agree, it’s way more inter­est­ing to debate an issue than to hear about my prod­ucts. And… if I get you think­ing about the issues I’m talk­ing about, which you have to be doing if you arrive at the con­clu­sion that you dis­agree with them, I’ve been suc­cess­ful.

David

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